UK Launches 54-Firm Tokenisation Taskforce Led by Chris Woolard and Wall Street Giants
- Shawn Jhanji
- 3 days ago
- 4 min read
For anyone in the UK still waiting to see whether tokenisation talk turns into tokenisation infrastructure, 13 July gave the clearest answer so far. Chris Woolard CBE, HM Treasury's Wholesale Digital Markets Champion, published his first report to the Chancellor, and it arrives with a taskforce of 54 firms behind it, including BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, HSBC, JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley and UBS.
The group is backed by the City of London Corporation and will spend the next year working on live tokenisation use cases across UK financial markets, starting with tokenised repo. Woolard, who spent eight years as chair of the Financial Conduct Authority before taking on the Champion role in April, is addressing the report to whoever holds the Chancellor's job next, a reminder that this is being built to outlast any one minister.
The headline numbers are designed to focus minds. Woolard's report estimates that wider tokenisation could add up to £33 billion to UK annual economic output and £14 billion in yearly tax revenue by 2035. For scale, Boston Consulting Group has estimated the global tokenised real world asset market could reach $88 trillion by 2035, dwarfing today's $3 trillion crypto and stablecoin market.
The UK's stated ambition is to make sure London captures a meaningful share of that shift rather than watching it happen in New York or Singapore.
The most concrete commitment in the report is DIGIT, the UK's planned digital gilt instrument. HM Treasury awarded the technology tender to HSBC in February, and Woolard is now pushing for an early pilot no later than the first quarter of 2027. Success would make the UK the first G7 nation to issue tokenised government debt. The Bank of England is also considering whether DIGIT, and tokenised assets more broadly, can be used as eligible collateral in its Sterling Monetary Framework operations, and is planning a discussion paper later this year on tokenised collateral at central counterparties.
Woolard framed the stakes bluntly. "Like all network games, it is a race and one where the U.K. needs to move at the speed of the most agile players if we want to ensure we have a stake in developing the approach for international markets," he said. Kirit Bhatia, Chief Digital Assets Officer at Banking Circle, pointed to the practical bottleneck behind that ambition: "Tokenised markets will need payment infrastructure that can support real time settlement, cross border movement, multiple forms of regulated money and interoperability between stablecoins, tokenised deposits and existing fiat rails. Without that, digital assets risk becoming faster at the edges but still constrained by the legacy plumbing underneath."
The taskforce is organised into action groups covering primary issuance, tokenised collateral, tokenised funds, payment rails, and legal and regulatory certainty, among others. That structure matters more than it sounds. Previous UK tokenisation milestones, including May's joint FCA and Bank of England vision document and the Digital Securities Sandbox, have been long on principle and comparatively short on named commitments from the institutions that would actually need to build the plumbing. Getting BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley to put engineering and legal resource against a shared roadmap, rather than simply issuing supportive statements, is a different order of commitment.
For UK founders and early stage investors, the direct relevance of this report is limited. It is a wholesale markets initiative, aimed at gilts, repo and institutional collateral, not at startup cap tables. But wholesale market plumbing has a habit of setting the technical and legal standards that private markets later borrow. The custody, settlement and legal certainty questions Woolard's taskforce is now working through, at gilt and repo scale, are close cousins of the questions that will eventually need answering for tokenised equity, PISCES linked liquidity and SEIS compliant share structures at the startup end of the market.
Watching how the taskforce resolves them over the next 12 months is a reasonable proxy for how quickly that certainty trickles down.
Other jurisdictions are not standing still. The US and EU are both examining how to integrate tokenisation into traditional finance, and the report's own language, calling this "a network game," is a tacit admission that the UK's advantage, if it has one, is time limited.
Key Takeaways
HM Treasury's Wholesale Digital Markets Champion Chris Woolard published his first report to the Chancellor on 13 July, backed by a 54 firm taskforce including BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, HSBC, JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley and UBS.
The taskforce, convened with the City of London Corporation, will spend the next year on live tokenisation use cases, starting with tokenised repo.
DIGIT, the UK's planned tokenised gilt, is targeted for an early pilot by the first quarter of 2027, which would make the UK the first G7 country to issue tokenised government debt.
The report estimates tokenisation could add up to £33 billion in annual UK economic output and £14 billion in annual tax revenue by 2035.
The initiative is wholesale market focused for now, but the custody, settlement and legal certainty work underway is likely to shape the standards that eventually apply to tokenised equity and SEIS compliant structures at the startup end of the market.
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